Quote:
Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos
You can't actually believe compassion is a Christian invention, but it comes across as though you do. You might want to clarify. Or not. But it is confusing.
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When you look at how Christianity emerged from the Greco-Roman pagan world, it becomes a lot easier to believe.
The pagan empires were cruel, melancholic, fate-ridden places to exist. Life was a serious of struggles against natural obstacles, and heroism was often expressed as a stoic refusal to be beaten by said obstacles. Life was cheap. For slaves - most of the ancient population - you were viewed as a technological unit, and nothing more.
As the central aspect of Christianity is that Christ came to absolve everyone from their sins, and in essence, to create a new man, you can see why that would be revolutionary within that particular world. The reverberations of that are still with us today, of course. One only has to examine the language of the 19th century English abolitionists to see how seriously they took the Gospel's view on human society, and the proper ordering of living between individuals from different political strata.